What is the Special Illustration Rare pull rate in Surging Sparks?

2.80% per booster pack — roughly 1 in 36 Surging Sparks packs contains a Special Illustration Rare card. Surging Sparks ships 11 Special Illustration Rare cards in its pool, so per-card odds are ≈1 in 393. The rate is PackRip's own published constant for that tier, identical in the simulator and in this dataset. It is not derived from real print-run data, which has never been published.

How many Surging Sparks packs to pull a Special Illustration Rare?

On average 36 packs to hit your first Special Illustration Rare — that's the expected value of a geometric distribution with parameter p=0.028000. At 95% confidence you'll have one within 106 packs. A sealed 36-pack booster box yields a Special Illustration Rare with probability 64.0%.

Which Special Illustration Rare cards are in Surging Sparks?

11 Special Illustration Rare cards: Pikachu ex, Latias ex, Milotic ex, Durant ex, Hydreigon ex, plus 6 more. The full list with TCGplayer market prices is in the table on this page. The most valuable by market price is Pikachu ex at $284.90.

Surging Sparks Special Illustration Rare Pull Rate — 2.80% per pack (1 in 36)

Pikachu ex — Surging Sparks

2.80% of Surging Sparks booster packs contain a Special Illustration Rare card — roughly 1 in 36 packs. Surging Sparks ships 11 Special Illustration Rare cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Special Illustration Rare is 0.0025 (≈1 in 393). These percentages come from PackRip's own rate table (the same constants the simulator runs on) — they are a model of the product, not a measurement of it. The Pokemon Company has never published pull rates.

Surging Sparks Special Illustration Rare pull-rate methodology

How PackRip computes this page
Formula	Tier odds = 2.80% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 11 Special Illustration Rare cards = 1 in 393.
Assumptions	One independent rare-slot roll per pack; uniform selection within the tier; no pity timers, box mapping, short-print correction, or edition/condition split.
Data source	Set checklist and rarity labels from the bundled Pokemon TCG API catalog; tier rates from `rareSlotRates()`, mirrored from the live pack opener.
Update cadence	Regenerated by prerender whenever set metadata, catalog data, or pull-rate constants change.
Limitations	This is a theoretical per-pack rate. Real sealed product can show print-run variance, collation quirks, and market-specific edition differences.

Special Illustration Rare cards in Surging Sparks

#	Card	TCGplayer market	Per-card odds
1	Pikachu ex #238	$284.90	1 in 393
2	Latias ex #239	$186.17	1 in 393
3	Milotic ex #237	$117.84	1 in 393
4	Durant ex #236	$39.70	1 in 393
5	Hydreigon ex #240	$36.59	1 in 393
6	Lisia's Appeal #246	$26.36	1 in 393
7	Alolan Exeggutor ex #242	$25.85	1 in 393
8	Jasmine's Gaze #245	$20.72	1 in 393
9	Archaludon ex #241	$12.51	1 in 393
10	Clemont's Quick Wit #243	$8.50	1 in 393
11	Drayton #244	$7.81	1 in 393

How the 2.80% rate is computed

Every Surging Sparks booster pack rolls one rare-slot card (plus uncommons, commons, and energy in fixed slots). The rare slot is itself a weighted random draw across 7 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Special Illustration Rare, and the era's other chase rarities. The Special Illustration Rare tier captures 2.80% of those rare-slot draws (= 2.80 packs out of every 100). Within the Special Illustration Rare tier, all 11 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 2.80% ÷ 11 = 0.0025 = 1 in 393.

This is the same math PackRip's live Surging Sparks simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 2.80% over a large enough sample. Source code lives in src/utils/packGenerator.ts and the per-rarity drift is build-time-asserted against the published rates so the simulator and this landing page can never disagree.

Cumulative probability — how many packs to hit Special Illustration Rare

Special Illustration Rare pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.028000. The expected number of packs until your first Special Illustration Rare hit is 36; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 106 packs. Most experienced openers crack a sealed booster box (36 packs) and hit Special Illustration Rare with probability 64.0% — so the average box yields just over 1.0 Special Illustration Rare pulls.